William Greenwood Fine Art has dated this piece to the 1920s.
Title: "The Blue Kimono". His wife Nellie is probably the model.
Signed and dated 1918. Oil on canvas.
Provenance: Sothebys sale, 17/7/02 no: 309.
Size: 30"x 25". Framed size: 36 3/4"x 31 3/4". Now in very good ready to hang condition . Free UK delivery.
William Kay BLACKLOCK (1872—1924) The artist is known to have died at Polperro and is buried there (registration district of Liskeard). He studied at the School of Art in Edinburgh, and at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1909 he married Ellen Eliza RICHARDSON (also known as 'Nellie') who was also to become his model for a series of paintings from 1910-1917, and who was an artist in her own right, painting and exhibiting her work at the RA. The couple set up their first home together in Chelsea, London, but shortly thereafter moved on to Walberswick in Suffolk where there was an active artists' community working.
W Kay Blacklock, as he signed his paintings, probably also painted in Holland as the subjects and titles of his paintings reveal, and his subject matter and style is akin, and reminds of Elizabeth FORBES. Born in Sunderland, in 1872, the artist was the second son of John Blacklock, engine fitter, and his wife Isabella née Blackett, who married at Sunderland in 1770. In the 1881 Census, William was an 8 year old living at 5 Hudson’s Buildings, Bishop Wearmouth, Sunderland with his parent’s, 39 year old John and 36 year old Isabella, and his two siblings, all born at Sunderland. His father died in 1886 and in 1891 young William was an 18 year old lithographer’s apprentice living at 10 Corporation Road, Rickersgate, Carlisle where his widowed mother was a publican. They had moved by 1901 to 4 Dixon Street, where William, still a lithographer, lived with his mother who was described as a ‘boarding house keeper’.
He then studied at the School of Art in Edinburgh and the Royal College of Art in London and became a painter in oil and watercolor. Living in London, he married at Chelsea in 1909, [Nellie] Ellen Eliza RICHARDSON. He seems to have added ‘Kay’ as his middle name when he took up as an artist.
In the 1911 Census Blacklock is listed as a 41 year old artist painter at 46 Gunder Grove, Chelsea with his wife, and a one year old daughter Eleanor Irene, who had been born in Chelsea. By 1912 they had moved to 'The Barn' Walberswick and in 1916 were still living at Walberswick but by 1922 they had moved on to Liskeard, Cornwall. He died at Polperro, Cornwall in 1924.
William Greenwood Fine Art has dated this piece to the 1920s.
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W. Kay Blacklock. "The Blue Kimono". Oil Portrait.
